Blackwell Reference Online

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Omnipresence is naturally understood as being everywhere present. Thus, to say that God is omnipresent is to say that he is present everywhere. But what does it mean to say that God is present at any place, much less at every place? St Anselm, writing in the eleventh century, struggled with this issue. In chapter 20 of his Monologion he offered an argument for the conclusion that “[t]he Supreme Being exists in every place and at all times.” In the following chapter, however, he argued that God “exists in no place and at no time.” Anselm then attempted to reconcile these “two conclusions - so contradictory according to their utterance, so necessary according to their proof” - by providing interpretations of them according to which they are both true, and, thus, not incompatible after all. This Anselm did by distinguishing two senses of “being wholly in a place,” namely, being contained in a place and being present at a place. In the first sense, those objects are wholly in a place “whose magnitude place contains by circumscribing it, and circumscribes by containing it.” Ordinary physical objects are thus contained in regions of space. In this sense, however, God is not in any place, for it is “a mark of shameless impudence to say that place circumscribes the magnitude of Supreme Truth.” On the other hand, God is in every place in the sense that he is present at every place. ... log in or subscribe to read full text